December 1, 2016 • 45 mins
If you've ever seen a flea circus, then count yourself among the few. It's a dying art, but back in the day they thrilled and delighted young and old alike. Learn all about the tiny big tops in today's episode.
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in the greater San Francisco Bay Area, we're also looking
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It's one of our favorite cities to perform in and
uh go to s F Sketch Fest dot com Oakland,
San Francisco. We will see you soon. Welcome to stuff
(01:07):
you should know from how Stuff Works dot Com. Hey,
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's
Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and there's Jerry Roland and that
makes this stuff. You should know the podcast. Yeah, who
(01:29):
would have ever thought that we could do more than
one podcast on fleas? Had I thought about flea circuses,
I would have thought that. Yeah, we covered it a
tiny little bit. I went back and looked just to
make sure we weren't being too redundant, and uh, we
just sort of mentioned it briefly. But how delightful to
(01:49):
dig in even further. Yeah, I mean, like, there's no
way that we really got into it because it's one
of like the least documented aspects of popular culture I've
ever come across, man, And there's so much misinformation, and
you run across people who act like they know exactly
what they're talking about, and then you do more research
and you find out they really are wrong in a
(02:10):
lot of it. It's it's really it was crazy. It
was a crazy research. Yeah, and you go to web
pages that are solid green with white letters punctuation. What's that? Yeah,
it was a little weird, but yeah, people take us
to task on the accuracy of this one. Then we'll
(02:32):
be like you, you go do better. So um, I
think we kind of gave it away. The cats out
of the bag, and so are it's fleas. We're doing
flee circuses. We're talking about flee circuses, and they actually,
like I think of police circus is fairly old timey,
but I usually think of him as like the twenties
or thirties, maybe even the forties from like that old
(02:53):
tech savery flee circus cartoons or um. But they go
way further back than that, or even the concept of
of training fleas in some way, shape or form goes
even further back than that. Yeah, which will we'll get
to it. But training them as a bit of a misnomer, Yeah,
that's a stretch for sure. It's sort of like tying
(03:14):
and gluing things to fleas and just let them be fleas. Yeah, basically,
as you will probably come to the same conclusion, flee
circuses are really mean. Yeah, they're cruel. No matter how
you feel about flease they are. Yeah, they're cruel, cruel
acts of barbarity. I think that's how the East to
buille it. Actually, Yeah, tiny cruel acts of barbarity comes
(03:36):
see Professor long Hair and his flee circus which torments
but they're small, so who cares? Right? Uh? So fifteen
seventies is uh. If this is accurate, we're all gonna
go all the way back to a man named Mark
Scalliot who uh did not have a flee circus, but
he was supposedly in London one of the first people,
(03:58):
or perhaps the first person to use a flee as
a prop of some sort. Yeah, to basically show off
his skills as what as a he was a blacksmith. Yeah,
it was a smithy. And he made like this really
really tiny intricate caller that he put around to flee
and he said, check this out. Yeah, and everyone was.
(04:21):
I guess because this apparently other people, uh like watchmakers
and stuff would would make little tiny watches as well
as gimmicks. But I guess the thing they were trying
to show is the only thing I can think of
is if I can make something this tiny that works,
imagine what a real size human watch would look like.
It would work even better. But he got kind of
(04:43):
famous from it from what I understand, and the idea
of using fleas called on kind of kind of well,
it took a couple of hundred years. But if if
you look into fleas and flee circuses, like I just
took him for granted, I never stopped and thought why fleas,
But there's actually really good reasons why fleas, and it
(05:04):
has to do with For one, fleas used to be everywhere,
Like no matter where you lived in the world, you
shared your living space with fleas, which must have been
pretty awful. But apparently it was just a fact of life.
So that's one thing. They're ubiquitous, they're easy to come by.
The other one is that fleas are really really good
(05:25):
at jumping, and that actually makes them, under the right circumstances,
really good for this flee circus idea. Yeah, and we
we you know, if you really want to itch yourself, uh,
go to listen to the fleet episode. Um. But they
come in a couple of thousand varieties, and the ones,
apparently for circuses are the little flat, reddish brown ones
(05:48):
about two point five millimeters in length, and um, they
can jump though two point five millimeters. They can jump
sometimes as high as eight nine inches in the air.
I saw it to ten. Oh, well, where you getting
that was from? The Royal Air Force experimental station. They
apparently set up some equipment in the sixties and we're
(06:09):
photographing fleas jumping. Oh yeah, see here that they said
that um, at the start of a jump, a flea jump,
they experienced forces greater than a hundred and forty times
out of gravity. Yeah, that's crazy. Yeah. They have these
little um what are called elastic cuticles in their legs
and they can store a tremendous amount of potential energy,
and when they release them and they jump, that potential
(06:32):
energy turns into kinetic energy. And since that it's basically
this elastic um connector that's really storing the energy, they're
not having to use up a lot of their own.
So they can jump like this, like thousands of times
in an hour. And apparently when they jump. I don't
I'm sure we said something somewhat contradictory in the actual
Fleas episode, but the relation of their jumps to their
(06:56):
body size, um, it compared to humans of like us
jumping over the Statue of Liberty or something along those lines,
which is very hard to do, ken harder every day. Man.
I was kind of thinking about these fleas jumping and
like evolutionarily speaking why, And I guess they're just so
(07:17):
small that when a dog goes to scratch or bite
at it, or whatever animal tried to get the fleet off,
they can't just be like, well, let me run away
as fast as I can, because the dog's bite will
still get it. So they learned, I think, quite literally,
how to jump and get the heck out of there
very very quickly in order to survive. And the coolest
(07:40):
fleas make the Bionic Man sound when they jump if
you listen really close. All the hipster fleas, right. Uh so,
I guess we should talk about the main dude though, right,
who we owe all of us owe a great debt too.
I'm not saying his name, you know, you've got to
say his name. This is the eight teen twenties, and
(08:01):
uh he was an Italian impresario in London named Louis
Berte Lotto nice. Yes, yeah, there's so many ohs and
t s. I thought I messed it up. No, I
know it's a it's an unusual name. Yeah. So he's
the guy in London who said, uh, I want to
(08:23):
be really famous one day, and my big idea is
to take fleas and put them in shows. Yeah, and
it worked. It did work. I saw somewhere that the
the origination of flee circuses it was um due largely
to him. But I didn't really see anybody else sighted
(08:44):
earlier than him. You know, the watchmaker, the smithy, Um Mark, Mark,
the blacksmith. He wasn't doing any kind of shows or tricks.
Louis Berte Lotto Um said, you know what, the fleas
aren't props. The fleas are going to be the stars
in my show. That's right, And I think he may
(09:05):
have been the one who had the the original idea
to do this. Yeah, I love our own article said
his show was part action, part humor, part social commentary.
But I think that was the case. You know, they would, uh,
well we might as well talk about what these things did.
They would do everything from high wire x to uh
sword fighting too, uh. Political and historical re enactments. Yeah.
(09:30):
They re enacted the Battle of Waterloo dressed dressed in
like military garb. Yeah. They would play a soccer or football. Uh.
They would do um, high diving, pretty amazing stuff, the
little pools of water. They would a little chariots and carriages. Yeah,
that was one of the first ones. Because you know,
(09:50):
I think, especially back in the early nineteenth century, people
didn't know everything there is to know about fleas like
we do today. So the idea of watching a little, tiny,
tiny flee, like a three millimeter long flee pulling like
a hearse or a chariot or a cart um that was,
you know, hundreds of times its own weight. Any better,
(10:13):
it's gonna it's gonna impress you, especially if you're a
five year old Chimney sweet who's owned by the guy
who bought you from your parents. Yeah. Or I actually
looked up some flea circuses on YouTube. Uh there were
just little kids. There was one and I think Denmark
in the nineteen fifties that I looked at. I saw
that and like in Telfair, Yeah, people were just delighted.
(10:36):
Oh yeah, I mean I watched some of the videos too,
and I noticed that, like my hands were classed together
beneath my chin. I think it might have been the
perfect post election uh youtubing that I could have done. Actually, yeah,
it worked pretty well. Uh so Bert sorry, Bert, his
(10:56):
uh his act was not small if you think, well,
sure he did this at some county fairs and sideshows
uh and then his wife made him stop. Yeah, not
true at all. He actually got really famous for this.
I don't know. I mean they likened him to Elvis Presley.
I don't know if he was that big. I think
the point the authors making is like that this guy
(11:16):
wasn't some some like, he wasn't Internet famous, he was
like famous famous, Like he traveled the world doing this.
It's good for him, right, Yeah, And he didn't. As
he traveled the world, people were like, I can do
that too. Tired of working, I want to do this.
But it turns out that from what I can tell,
(11:36):
as far as showbiz goes, running your own flee circus
has got to be one of the more demanding side
shows there there are. Well sure, I mean part of
the problem is your performers. Well, first of all, it
says in here and this is like again with this research,
you just sort of have to take some of these
people at their word. But they say that about one
(11:57):
in tin fleas can even make the cut, right. Uh.
Once you find your your champion team of they're they're
gonna die and there need to be cared for and
traveling all over the world with your prized fleas is precarious. Well, yeah.
Especially um, if you're traveling to do shows and colder
(12:19):
climbs there aren't fleas, and fleas don't do very well there.
Your whole troop may die the night before a show.
Can you imagine? But apparently it happened a lot. There
was a guy I read and I'm not quite sure
who it was, but they he had a a standing
gig in I think Switzerland maybe or somewhere somewhat northern Europe,
(12:41):
and he had to send down No she I'm sorry,
she had to send down to Majorca to get um
fresh shipments of fleas like every two weeks because hers
just kept She couldn't keep them alive any longer than Yes,
I have offers from all over the world to take
my show, but you're afraid of one thing when you
get out of the country, can you at fleas? I
went to Sweden and I had to send to ma
(13:02):
Yorka in Spain to get fleas fortnite every fortnight. Who
was that? It was a woman a sword swallower right? Uh?
Was that Professor Tomlin? No, I can't remember her name,
but she's like a legendary sword swallower. Um professor tests No,
Professor Chester. No, none of the professors, And that was
another thing I noticed from this too, but I couldn't
(13:24):
really find the origin. Apparently, if you had a flee
circuses from from like the nineteenth century to the early
twentieth century, you the flea master, build yourself as professor
or whatever. So there's just all these really weird trends.
But the in the history of flee circuses, it was
like one person would come up with an idea and
then they go and show it and for some reason
(13:46):
it would attract a bunch of other imitators, and that's
that's basically the history of it. I would have built
myself as account oh man, you know, that would have
broken new ground. But they would have to pay money.
And this says in the nineteen fifties professors still said
we pay six shillings a dozen, although there have been
times of shortage when a single flea has cost as
much as two shillings. Well, you know, also, if you
(14:08):
look around today, at which I did, I couldn't find
anywhere to buy fleas. You have to send off for
um overseas um. But I've thought, surely there's some weirdo
somewhere who's selling fleas to flee circuses and there are none,
none whatsoever. Well, there is a flee circus in Germany. Still, yeah,
(14:30):
at the Munich October Fest. Where else would you have one?
Oh it's Mimi Gono, that was her name, the flee circus,
uh woman? Okay, yeah, alright, so you wanna take a
little break here, Yeah, all right, well let's break. Let's
go pick the fleas from our own bodies. I know,
I'm I'm itching or scratching. Then maybe we can train
(14:51):
them to finish this episode for us. So, Chuck, we
(15:19):
we kind of made it as far as Bertie Lotto,
and there's actually a lot of mystery surrounding that guy.
Here's the weird thing. Okay, I'm going to confess something
to you. When I first read this article, I was like, well,
here's a stinker. Then I dug in a little further
and I was like, oh, I'm being tortured with research
to do a stinker. And then the more I did,
the more I did, the more I dug in, I'd
(15:41):
find these weird little things that kept popping up that
combined create the the the history or the culture of
flea circuses. And and the more I came upon these
little things and putting them together more the more. I
was just totally delighted. But then I think, like you
when I when I finally hit YouTube and it was like, okay,
I need to see some of these. Then I was like,
(16:02):
I love flee circuses. I could sit here and talk
about him all day. Well, we'll try and keep this
all day. So I just realized I didn't finish my thought.
The um the weird little thing that I found out
about Professor bar Lolo, thanks man Um, he just vanished,
(16:24):
he disappeared. He was like as famous as as an astronaut,
and then all of a sudden he's gone. And there's
a guy um who is uh. I think his name
is Andy Rich. He's like basically the foremost Flee circus
researcher working today. And he found Professor Berto Lotto. Apparently
(16:44):
he moved to Canada and lived out the rest of
his life and anonymity. Wow, yeah, I have a question.
Why do you always use asked not as a fame indicator,
it's uh, it's as Simpsons reference. It's Homer was saying,
somebody who's richer than an astronat. I was gonna challenge
you and say, name an astronaut. Oh, dude, Jim Lovell No, no, no,
(17:08):
name a current astronaut. Oh current astronat We got Mark
Kelly and Scott Kelly. Okay, alright, t get back off.
Then her their parents called them Project Jim and I,
oh that's cute. But they think they not just made
that up? Oh really? Yeah? Oh man, that would have
been surely someone as I thought of that. If not,
(17:30):
I'm gonna trade market. Uh yeah, and then you could
blackmail them. I feel like you want this nickname. I
know you're richer than an astro. Alright, So early nineteen hundreds,
if you're talking imitators over here in the United States,
we had a man named William Heckler, and he was
one of the first dudes over here to be a
(17:50):
successful fleamaster. And uh he did the usual things, made
them box and race and juggle. And we're gonna tell
you some of these secret it's by the way. If
you're wondering how these things are accomplished, just hang in there. Uh.
And he said at one point he was bringing in
two hundred and fifty dollars uh day or performance in
(18:12):
a in a day of performances, a day. Yeah, so
many many performances. And here's the thing if lee I
kind of wondered I was, because I didn't find it
until later in the research, like, well, how do you
see this stuff? But you wouldn't have very many people
in there. You'd have like ten or fifteen people crowded
around a little table for six to ten minutes. You
(18:33):
would shuffle them out and bring in the next group. Yes,
I saw somewhere that if you were really dedicated to it.
I think Cecil Adams wrote it on the on the
Street dope that if you were like a really dedicated performer,
you could conceivably do fifty ten minute performances a day.
So that's basically like ten hours with a ten minute
(18:53):
break every hour. And if you're not a really dedicated
flea master, then just get out of my face. What
do you even bother? Seriously, though, I mean is when
we talk about how to do this, it will become
clear just how much work this must be. Yeah, alright,
well let's talk a little bit about that. Um, every
flee is different. And like I said, uh, if you
believe the research, about ten percent of the fleezer fit
(19:16):
for the job, and it's like we mentioned, you don't
really train them. What you do is back in the day,
you would take either some silken thread or some really
thin gold wire, like hopefully you can't even see it,
that's sort of the idea, and you tie a little
tiny noose of sorts around this fleezer neck. And apparently
(19:41):
that was really hard to do because when a fleet
eats the blood of their master, which is true, we'll
get to that again later, but their next well, so
you can't tie it too tight or else they're gonna
die and your prize flee could die. Or if it's
too loose, then the flea goes away and the chariot
(20:03):
stays behind, and that's no good. And you just hear
a tiny bionic man sounds right, So um, that's very hard.
Number one. Number two the idea that you have to
do that with new fleas every I would guess probably
every few weeks if you're on average, because fleas, I
(20:25):
mean they live maybe a year. Most fleas live about
three or four months. So you've got like a some
star performers and they're just they're performing, you know, for
a few months or whatever. So you're having to basically
constantly harness fleas all the time, and and again before
you even harness them, you have to sort them. So
(20:46):
you have to study and observe the adult fleas see
which one's like to jump. Um. There's an old legend,
uh that apparently came from Professor Heckler's son, if not
Professor Heckler himself, who said, um, you you put a
lid over a jar, and you can train them not
to jump too high because they'll hit their head on
(21:07):
the jar and they don't like to do that. So
they learned not to jump. Then they've passed their first test.
It's not clear whether that's actually hocum or not, but um,
that's for for a very long time, that's been part
of the lower of training fleets. The problem is, I
think you said it, please can't actually learn anything. They're
(21:27):
not really being trained. They're actually being physically restrained in
lots of ways, including that harness and starting with the harness. Well,
I don't know, though, Heckler. Professor Heckler that is also said,
and this was fascinating to me as far as whether
or not these fleas can learn anything. He said that
he would to get the best fleas, put them in
a glass jar. Uh, that's too tall for them to
(21:50):
jump out. And he said that he would notice the
really good fleas would jump up on the side, fart
out a little bit of sticky stuff, whatever that is,
and then spend the rest of the time trying and
trying to hit that identical spot again to grab hold
of the sticky stuff basically a foothold to be close
(22:11):
enough to the top to leap out. Amazing. I don't know,
hope I believe it. He well, yeah, I mean he
was a showman, consummist, showman, Like he didn't just basically
point and be like, look at the fleas, came your money,
please leave now, Like you were like carrying the show on, right,
you had to tell this this this, You had to
help the performance along, your professor, for god's sake, right,
(22:34):
when this guy is being interviewed over the years, I
can't imagine he didn't like ham it up in the interviews.
So I don't know, like a lot of it's lost
too to time, what was true and what wasn't as
far as these these old guys go. Yeah, but he uh,
Professor Heckler also said when he was picking them out,
and he said, stodgy wins are broken to the merry
(22:56):
go round harness flight he fleas make good dancers. Those
with especially strong legs will become kickers, jugglers and chariot racers. Yes,
so you've got you've got fleas harness. That's like the
first initial thing, but there's other things you need to
do to them. To write. You can take that harness,
and the most basic thing you could do is take
(23:17):
that harness and actually hook it up to, like you said,
a chariot or or or a merry go round or
something like that. And yeah, people will be like, that's
pretty neat, that's cool. But before I could do that,
you know, but you could do other stuff too, and
a lot of it involves glue unfortunately. So say like
you take a tiny piece of um of wood or
(23:40):
a tiny piece of metal and you glue it to
the flea's arms, right, Yes, and we should say once
that happens, that's it. That's never that's never coming off
for the rest of the fleas life. Yeah. I mean,
do you think they even survived that day? I think so. Yeah.
(24:01):
I think that they typically survive a few weeks of performing. Okay,
so even if they had a little sword glued to
their body. Yeah, I think they live horrible lives. I
mean basically, we as a species should know more about
this because if the fleas have a rise up and
become intelligent, like our backs are against the wall for
what the flee circus flea masters have done to them
(24:22):
glued to the wall, they'll be like, oh, guess whose
turn it is? Alright, so go ahead, Oh so you
you um, you glue a piece of stick or something
to their arms, and remember already they're harnessed. And then
you do the same thing to another flee and then
you tie their harnesses down and you just kind of
tickle them or do something to stimulate them, and they
(24:43):
start waving their arms and it looks like the sword fighting.
So that's a really good example of a flee circus.
Like you're you're having them do things, and then the
flea masters like, well, look at this, this is a
sword fight, everybody see they're doing or fencing or something
like that, right, and train them to do so exactly exactly.
So there's there's these things were Really it's the interaction
(25:06):
between a restrained flee, usually with the prop glued to it,
defending itself or responding to some sort of noxious or
threatening stimuli and then the flea master coming in and saying, oh,
they're they're fencing, or they're walking the high wire something
or there. This is Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo. Yeah,
(25:28):
they would play soccer. Like I said, So, what they
would do there is they would get a little piece
of cotton wool. Uh, they would soak it in something
that the fleet doesn't like, some odorous, malodorous thing. Yeah,
I looked that up. Like lavender works really well, citranilla,
cedar oil, those are all lovely. That's the shame. But
come to think of it, when you see natural flee sprays,
(25:48):
that's what's in natural flee spray exactly. So they would
soak it in that stuff and then uh, just the
flee would literally just kick at it to get it
away like a little soccer ball. Right, they're either kicking
at it to get it away or because they were
restrained and when they kick, instead of it propelling the
flea away, it's repelling the ball away from them. So
(26:09):
if you have them this kind of do that back
and forth, then yeah, they're playing soccer. What about juggling, Josh,
love it what you do there is he would glue
a flee to its on its back basically and then
put another little tiny piece of cotton and their legs
and they would kick at it trying to get it off,
(26:29):
and it apparently would just kind of go up and
down and spin around like it was juggling. Amazing. Yeah,
and like this is this is uh thanks to Heckler
in particular in the United States. Um, he really started
hitting the county fairs and um, the the the carnivals,
so it became basically part and parcel with the with
(26:52):
sideshows the circus. Like basically, anytime you went to a
decent carnival, there's a flea circus there. Yeah. And I
get the feeling that these professors would try and they
would try and innovate, They would try and come up
with new tricks and new things that would delight people,
because you want to keep people coming back, you know, right,
So that's where you come up with things like the
(27:13):
the hype Howire act and the flea walls when it
would appear as if a fleet orchestra was playing and
fleas were dancing. Yeah, because there's there's other things that
fleas respond to. Two besides um citronella. They respond very
well the heat. They can sense heat very well, and
if it gets too hot, they want to get out
of there. So if you apply heat from beneath on
(27:36):
say like uh just um, I don't know, a drumhead
or something like that, they'll all start hopping around. But
if they if they can't get away, if they're harnessed in,
then it looks like they're dancing. If you put a
little flea orchestra to the side with instruments glued to
their their arms at a nice backbeat exactly, then you
have fleas playing music and fleas dancing to it. A
(27:57):
fleet ball. Uh. So this all is delightful and well
and good. Um, but what fun is a naked little
flee doing these things? If you could have a flee
dressed up as Napoleon, right, And that's what they did.
They apparently historical figures were lampooned. Uh. They would supposedly
(28:19):
get Mexican nuns who had quote nimble fingers tired and
eyes deteriorated. I don't see how that makes any sense.
So they're these they they're nimble fingers grew tired in
their eyes deteriorated as we're making these things. Okay, I
thought that was that was a good quality they look
for in a Mexican nun. Seems stress. How are your
(28:43):
nimble fingers feeling? That's kind of tired. They're tired. That's sad.
Actually then, so they would get apparently these Mexican nuns
to make these tiny little costumes, and um, they're still
on display today if you go to uh, how do
you pronounce that name? England? Mispronounced everything in England. It's
spelled Hertfordshire show Cambridge, all right, Cambridge, England. I think
(29:08):
it's where at the Rothschild Zoological Museum there are two
fleas dressed as Mexican fleas on display, and right in
our lovely Edinburgh, Scotland that we adored so much. Had
I sped at home, had I known that there was
a museum of childhood there with a flea wedding party
dressed up on display, I would have gone in a second.
(29:32):
But yeah, it was a thing. I think it was
already a thing in Mexico, and the flea circus masters
said hey, I need to get some of those, so chuck,
if you have a bunch of fleas and they're making
you money. You want to keep them alive, right, how
would you do that? Well, as we all know, fleas
(29:53):
or parasitic blood suckers. Uh. And so they would just
go down to the blog bank and get a bag
of blood right right, and let the fleece swim around
in it. Yeah, and they loved it. Know what they
would do is and this is like, it gives me
chills thinking about it. They would roll up their sleeves
and stick their arm down there and let the fleas
feed on their bodies. Yeah, a couple of times a day.
(30:16):
But apparently apparently though it was part of every single
show that you would end the show with. And now,
since these fleet performers have done so great, I shall
let them least on my blood, and the crowd would
be like you gross? That makes sense. Yeah, it was
part of stage pattern, but apparently at least Heckler, but
I'm sure others actually did let the fleece feed on them. Uh. Yeah.
(30:41):
I mean, what's a good flea master to do? Well,
feed your fleas blood Either that or have like again,
a chimney sweep that you bought from a chimney sweeper
to let the Fleece feed on. I hope that the
episode has come out, but it's going to be really confused. Yeah,
or it'll be really delightful when it does come out
and they'll be like, oh that makes sense now. Hey,
(31:05):
one more thing about Heckler. So there was a Heckler Sr.
And Junior, and apparently Junior kept it going in Times
Square until like the late fifties had a flee circus going,
and Heckler's flee Circus shows up in a scene an
Easy Rider. No way. Yeah, I couldn't figure out what's scene.
I didn't have time to go check, but there's a
(31:28):
scene an Easy Rider where in the background there's Heckler's
flee Circus. And then they were pushed out of Times
Square by peep shows, and then the peep shows were
pushed out by Walt Disney and Giuliani. Yeah, Heckler tried
at first to do pants less flee circus, but it
didn't work very well. Yeah, no one wants and finally
(31:50):
just packed it up. All right, Well, let's take one
final break here and we will talk about another kind
of flee circus right after this. So check one thing
(32:22):
that I found. I'm pretty sure you found it too,
was that when you start looking into flee circuses, some
people think that there is never such a thing as
flee circuses that used real fleas. Yeah, I thought you
were going to say, when you start looking into flee circuses,
there's no going back, you'll never be the same again.
That's definitely your like, unchanged forever. Yeah. I always thought
(32:45):
that flee circuses were a complete ruse and that there
were never any real fleas performing, right, Apparently, No, that's
not the case. There have been, and indeed, ours recently
as the nineties, there have been flee circuses that you
real fleas following these traditions that we just mentioned. But
(33:05):
if you believe that there are plenty of flee circuses
out there that don't use any fleas whatsoever, you're right too,
because there's both. Yes, there's the type of flee circus
that doesn't use fleas is called a humbug flee circus.
It's all it's all stage magic, it's all illusion, and
it's pretty pretty awesome. Actually. Yeah. There was a man,
(33:29):
a magician named George Tollerton in the nineteen thirties, and
he wrote a booklet actually um outlining fake flee circuses
and skits that you can do wherein you're sort of
the I mean, while the carnival barking was going on
in the real flee circuses. Um, you you really want
(33:49):
to take center stage if you have a fake flee
circus as then not only introducing the death defying feats,
but then you are are following these fleas, jumping around
on with mimicking it with your eyes and following it around,
you know, by moving your head around as if the
audience is looking at some invisible thing, which they are, right, right,
(34:12):
they are, and you're basically just using your powers of
suggestion to get them to think they're seeing what you're saying. Right, Yeah,
that's the most like basic humbug flee circus there are, right,
But there's one in that that started like that. I
guess the genuine stagecraft stage magic um humbug flee circus
(34:36):
came about from Michael Benteen, who was a goon actually, right,
remember that explain that the goons showed up in the
Monty Python episode. They were the direct predecessor of Monty Python,
Spike Milligan and his goons. Yes, he wasn't a hockey
playing goon. That's a different thing. Or a goon on
(34:58):
Scooby Doo or a goony, right, just a regular old goon. Yeah,
Michael Benty and he was a British performer and entertainer
and he uh in nineteen fifty performed that the UH
called the Royal Variety Show. I guess I think so.
And it was a little, you know, fake flee circus
(35:19):
apparently pretty elaborate one, yeah, because rather than just using
like his um power of suggestion, he was using things
like magnets and remote control pumps and mechanical devices to
really kind of do this exaggerated simulation of a flee
doing stuff going through the circuit of his flee circus. Right.
(35:42):
So he would say, have a magnet or a piece
of string of something or something pushing a ball or
rather pulling a ball up a hill an incline, and
he would say that this is the uh, the flee
sysiphus and he's pushing this ball up a hill, right
or um, this is this is my favorite. This gets
me every time a flee going up on the high
dive board and then so as he's going up there,
(36:05):
the wrongs of the ladder, each one gets depressed right,
so you can see the fleece progress up. The ladder
gets up to the end of the board, jumps a
couple of times, so the springboard goes up and down,
and then it makes a springing sound as he jumps
off right exactly dives into the water, and there's like
this huge splash, which a fleet could never make a
(36:25):
splash to begin with, but a huge one. It's just hilarious.
Or I like the one the sand table. They would
have a little sandbox in the fleet with the fake
fleet would invisibly jump around, but it would create a
little splash of sand everywhere. He dropped all over the
place and again, all with magnets, all fake ery. Yeah,
(36:45):
but really really clever. I get the impression. He was
not um, not terribly old at the time when he
first debuted on tv UM, And in the grand tradition
of flee circuses, some other people saw it and said,
I want to do it too, So the Humbug flee
circus took off and became pretty popular, and like the
(37:06):
second half of the twentieth century, I should say popular
as far as flee circuses go, which is to say,
not very popular, right, popular among weirdos. Yeah, I'm really
kind of wondering about this burta Lotto and his fame,
like he might not have been I don't know. I
mean just because you travel the world. I mean, he
(37:26):
could have been traveling the world performing in front of
you know, sixty people a day. That's not exactly Elvis.
It's true. This whole thing is under a cloud of suspicion,
is yeah. Man, it's really tough to figure out the
what's from the who's, and the winds and the why
and the fleas from the magnets. Yeah. Yeah, because once
(37:48):
you introduced that humbug ury into it, everything comes into question.
There was, actually, though, there was a book that I
want to get. It's a it's a pamphlet basically turned
into a book from that a guy named Tom Palmer wrote.
It's called the Famous Flee Act, and it teaches you
everything you need to know to do a humbug flee circus.
(38:12):
I just want to read it just for funzies. You know,
Christmas is coming up. I bet you someone out there
I'll send that to you. I was talking to you.
That's just someone else out there. Well okay, uh my
call to you. The public listening stuff you should know
public is Ano. They're doing this in October Fest. But
(38:34):
somebody needs to bring this back in a big way. Well,
a woman did in the nineties, but it didn't take
for very long. But I mean it was pretty big
in the nineties. Um. Her name was h what is it, Chuck,
Maria Fernanda Cardoso. Okay, did you read about her? No,
you should check out her act. You didn't see the
(38:55):
video of it. No, there's like a seven eight minute
vimeo of her and apparently it's just the highlights, So
I guess their act was longer, and she's a performance artist,
so um it was. She did it at like different places,
like she did at the New Museum in New York
and um, San Francisco and just kind of some some
(39:16):
pretty neat places places you wouldn't expect to see a
flee circus, is what I'm saying. I guess. But she
used live fleece in the grand tradition of flee circuses
and uh made a very beautiful, neat almost circutus, so
laish flee circus in the nineties. Yeah, but there's a
video of it, or there's plenty of videos. I'm sure
(39:38):
of it out there. Um, just flick her up and
look for the flee circus video with with our thumbs
up on it. Yeah, and you know, we kind of
joked about this being cruel it. Um, it's easy to
say this is a fleece and who cares. But I'm
sure there are people that get up in arms about
using any sort of you know, mistreating and animal for
(40:00):
any kind of or insects, animals. Let's just say for
this argument, for sure, for the entertainment of humans. You know,
there's probably at least one person out there that thinks
this is a very cruel thing to do. Know, there's uh,
there's apparently um societies that are dedicated to preventing cruelty
to insects in particular, and they have called specifically for
(40:24):
flea circuses to be banned outright. And they make a
pretty convincing case, especially if you don't allow yourself to
stop and remind yourself that these are fleas we're talking about.
But they you know, they're held in captivity their whole lives.
They're held um, they're connected by a harness that keeps
them held down their entire lives. The tricks that they're
(40:47):
performing are actually like stress behaviors. Um, and uh, they
die probably prematurely. Yeah, well as what went off on
fleas in the fleet episode, So I can't really say
anything about that. Sure, I've had bad infestations and I've
had no problem grabbing them between my hands and holding
(41:09):
them underwater until they slowly drowned. Right, They're like, please
just crush me, and you say, never drown. You can't
crush them. You can crush a flee if you get
it's hardy fingernails, that's your problem. You butt your fingernails
too much. Yeah, but you try to smash a flee
and he just goes dying. Do do do do? Yeah?
(41:30):
Anything else? Um, you can buy flee circuses, ready made
flea circuses if you want. Well that's fun. Yeah, um,
like an ant form. Good luck finding fleas is the thing, right,
and I think that's it. Man, that's a flea circuses.
Just go watch some flee circus videos on TV or
(41:51):
on the computer TV. You're gonna love it. Yeah, it's
a good way to just dumb it down and check out. Yeah,
it's delightful though too. Uh, since I said it's delightful
if you want to know, that's right, I got all order.
I was thinking about Flee circuses. Yeah, if you want
to know more about Flee Circus, it's do what I
just said, and you can also type those words in
the search part. How stuff works. And since I said
(42:13):
it's delightful, before it's time for a listener mail, I'm
gonna call this what the writer called it, which is
pick me for listener mail. Thanks from a teacher. Okay,
it's hard to resist. Josh, Chuck and Jerry, and finally
writing do you all. I've been listening stuff you should
know for years. I think I've listened to nearly every episode,
(42:34):
even the ones from the Dark Days when the discussion
lasted fewer than ten minutes and Josh was still looking
for his perfect podcasting partner. My sister introduced me to you.
So if you pick this for listener mail, please do
be extremely cool. If you give my sister Laura a
shout wow, that is really nice. If you, Chuck, is
you're feeling very generous regardless, I've been meaning to email
(42:55):
my thanks and praise for your work. I was at
high school english teacher in Illinois, but reesely relocated Chattanooga, Tennessee,
where I've been moved on where I've moved on to
become a community college professor. Uh. A professor. Maybe she
could train police. Uh. Your podcast has been a great
supplemental teaching tool, not to mention, a guaranteed way to
keep my mind occupied during long road trips to and
(43:16):
from undergraduate and graduate school or while running with my dog.
Us the episode on book banning several times while teaching
to Kill a Mockingbird or informing students about Banned book Week.
I've also used the episode about police interrogation during a
unit featuring Walter dean Myer's novel Monster, about a boy
who was on trial for a crime he may not
have committed. That sounds good, it does, uh. And more recently,
(43:39):
I use a listener mail about the benefits of hunting
as an example of how to structure an argument. Let's
hear that. I want to hear that argument. We'll schefs
are right back in. Uh. The students got a laugh
out of Josh's comments about waiting for the deer to
fall over and collecting the dead bodies instead of actually
killing the animal. Anyway. Really enjoyed the show. Look forward
(44:01):
to new episodes every week. If teaching doesn't work out
for some reason, I think podcasting would be a pretty
great career. Uh. And that is from Sarah Amato, Professor Amato,
and uh shout out to Laura yep, her sister, Laura
Amato or whatever her name is. Shout out not presuming
they have the same last name. My modern guy you
(44:25):
are anyway, you have a beard. Thanks for teaching and
uh doing what you do, Professor. Yeah, and thanks for
writing in Smart Thinking with the subject line. If you
want to get in touch with us, you can tweet
to us. I'm at josh um Clark at Twitter, and
you can also follow the official s Y s K
(44:45):
podcast on Twitter, Getting Out with Chuck at Charles W.
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joined us at our home on the web, Stuff you
Should Know dot com. For more on this and thousands
(45:08):
of other topics, visit how Stuff Works dot com. MHM
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(00:21):
k S for ten percent off your first purchase Google
in Squarespace, make your professional, make it beautiful. Hey, everybody
in the greater San Francisco Bay Area, we're also looking
at you. Oakland. We are coming out to Sketch Fest
this year again for the second year in a row,
and we're doing it rare Sunday afternoon jam, so that
is Sunday, January at one pm. You can come see
(00:44):
us live and tickets are gonna go fast, So go
to s F Sketch Fest dot com and just click
on the little ticket links or look at the lineup
and follow us there and we can't wait to see everyone.
It's one of our favorite cities to perform in and
uh go to s F Sketch Fest dot com Oakland,
San Francisco. We will see you soon. Welcome to stuff
(01:07):
you should know from how Stuff Works dot Com. Hey,
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's
Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and there's Jerry Roland and that
makes this stuff. You should know the podcast. Yeah, who
(01:29):
would have ever thought that we could do more than
one podcast on fleas? Had I thought about flea circuses,
I would have thought that. Yeah, we covered it a
tiny little bit. I went back and looked just to
make sure we weren't being too redundant, and uh, we
just sort of mentioned it briefly. But how delightful to
(01:49):
dig in even further. Yeah, I mean, like, there's no
way that we really got into it because it's one
of like the least documented aspects of popular culture I've
ever come across, man, And there's so much misinformation, and
you run across people who act like they know exactly
what they're talking about, and then you do more research
and you find out they really are wrong in a
(02:10):
lot of it. It's it's really it was crazy. It
was a crazy research. Yeah, and you go to web
pages that are solid green with white letters punctuation. What's that? Yeah,
it was a little weird, but yeah, people take us
to task on the accuracy of this one. Then we'll
(02:32):
be like you, you go do better. So um, I
think we kind of gave it away. The cats out
of the bag, and so are it's fleas. We're doing
flee circuses. We're talking about flee circuses, and they actually,
like I think of police circus is fairly old timey,
but I usually think of him as like the twenties
or thirties, maybe even the forties from like that old
(02:53):
tech savery flee circus cartoons or um. But they go
way further back than that, or even the concept of
of training fleas in some way, shape or form goes
even further back than that. Yeah, which will we'll get
to it. But training them as a bit of a misnomer, Yeah,
that's a stretch for sure. It's sort of like tying
(03:14):
and gluing things to fleas and just let them be fleas. Yeah, basically,
as you will probably come to the same conclusion, flee
circuses are really mean. Yeah, they're cruel. No matter how
you feel about flease they are. Yeah, they're cruel, cruel
acts of barbarity. I think that's how the East to
buille it. Actually, Yeah, tiny cruel acts of barbarity comes
(03:36):
see Professor long Hair and his flee circus which torments
but they're small, so who cares? Right? Uh? So fifteen
seventies is uh. If this is accurate, we're all gonna
go all the way back to a man named Mark
Scalliot who uh did not have a flee circus, but
he was supposedly in London one of the first people,
(03:58):
or perhaps the first person to use a flee as
a prop of some sort. Yeah, to basically show off
his skills as what as a he was a blacksmith. Yeah,
it was a smithy. And he made like this really
really tiny intricate caller that he put around to flee
and he said, check this out. Yeah, and everyone was.
(04:21):
I guess because this apparently other people, uh like watchmakers
and stuff would would make little tiny watches as well
as gimmicks. But I guess the thing they were trying
to show is the only thing I can think of
is if I can make something this tiny that works,
imagine what a real size human watch would look like.
It would work even better. But he got kind of
(04:43):
famous from it from what I understand, and the idea
of using fleas called on kind of kind of well,
it took a couple of hundred years. But if if
you look into fleas and flee circuses, like I just
took him for granted, I never stopped and thought why fleas,
But there's actually really good reasons why fleas, and it
(05:04):
has to do with For one, fleas used to be everywhere,
Like no matter where you lived in the world, you
shared your living space with fleas, which must have been
pretty awful. But apparently it was just a fact of life.
So that's one thing. They're ubiquitous, they're easy to come by.
The other one is that fleas are really really good
(05:25):
at jumping, and that actually makes them, under the right circumstances,
really good for this flee circus idea. Yeah, and we
we you know, if you really want to itch yourself, uh,
go to listen to the fleet episode. Um. But they
come in a couple of thousand varieties, and the ones,
apparently for circuses are the little flat, reddish brown ones
(05:48):
about two point five millimeters in length, and um, they
can jump though two point five millimeters. They can jump
sometimes as high as eight nine inches in the air.
I saw it to ten. Oh, well, where you getting
that was from? The Royal Air Force experimental station. They
apparently set up some equipment in the sixties and we're
(06:09):
photographing fleas jumping. Oh yeah, see here that they said
that um, at the start of a jump, a flea jump,
they experienced forces greater than a hundred and forty times
out of gravity. Yeah, that's crazy. Yeah. They have these
little um what are called elastic cuticles in their legs
and they can store a tremendous amount of potential energy,
and when they release them and they jump, that potential
(06:32):
energy turns into kinetic energy. And since that it's basically
this elastic um connector that's really storing the energy, they're
not having to use up a lot of their own.
So they can jump like this, like thousands of times
in an hour. And apparently when they jump. I don't
I'm sure we said something somewhat contradictory in the actual
Fleas episode, but the relation of their jumps to their
(06:56):
body size, um, it compared to humans of like us
jumping over the Statue of Liberty or something along those lines,
which is very hard to do, ken harder every day. Man.
I was kind of thinking about these fleas jumping and
like evolutionarily speaking why, And I guess they're just so
(07:17):
small that when a dog goes to scratch or bite
at it, or whatever animal tried to get the fleet off,
they can't just be like, well, let me run away
as fast as I can, because the dog's bite will
still get it. So they learned, I think, quite literally,
how to jump and get the heck out of there
very very quickly in order to survive. And the coolest
(07:40):
fleas make the Bionic Man sound when they jump if
you listen really close. All the hipster fleas, right. Uh so,
I guess we should talk about the main dude though, right,
who we owe all of us owe a great debt too.
I'm not saying his name, you know, you've got to
say his name. This is the eight teen twenties, and
(08:01):
uh he was an Italian impresario in London named Louis
Berte Lotto nice. Yes, yeah, there's so many ohs and
t s. I thought I messed it up. No, I
know it's a it's an unusual name. Yeah. So he's
the guy in London who said, uh, I want to
(08:23):
be really famous one day, and my big idea is
to take fleas and put them in shows. Yeah, and
it worked. It did work. I saw somewhere that the
the origination of flee circuses it was um due largely
to him. But I didn't really see anybody else sighted
(08:44):
earlier than him. You know, the watchmaker, the smithy, Um Mark, Mark,
the blacksmith. He wasn't doing any kind of shows or tricks.
Louis Berte Lotto Um said, you know what, the fleas
aren't props. The fleas are going to be the stars
in my show. That's right, And I think he may
(09:05):
have been the one who had the the original idea
to do this. Yeah, I love our own article said
his show was part action, part humor, part social commentary.
But I think that was the case. You know, they would, uh,
well we might as well talk about what these things did.
They would do everything from high wire x to uh
sword fighting too, uh. Political and historical re enactments. Yeah.
(09:30):
They re enacted the Battle of Waterloo dressed dressed in
like military garb. Yeah. They would play a soccer or football. Uh.
They would do um, high diving, pretty amazing stuff, the
little pools of water. They would a little chariots and carriages. Yeah,
that was one of the first ones. Because you know,
(09:50):
I think, especially back in the early nineteenth century, people
didn't know everything there is to know about fleas like
we do today. So the idea of watching a little, tiny,
tiny flee, like a three millimeter long flee pulling like
a hearse or a chariot or a cart um that was,
you know, hundreds of times its own weight. Any better,
(10:13):
it's gonna it's gonna impress you, especially if you're a
five year old Chimney sweet who's owned by the guy
who bought you from your parents. Yeah. Or I actually
looked up some flea circuses on YouTube. Uh there were
just little kids. There was one and I think Denmark
in the nineteen fifties that I looked at. I saw
that and like in Telfair, Yeah, people were just delighted.
(10:36):
Oh yeah, I mean I watched some of the videos too,
and I noticed that, like my hands were classed together
beneath my chin. I think it might have been the
perfect post election uh youtubing that I could have done. Actually, yeah,
it worked pretty well. Uh so Bert sorry, Bert, his
(10:56):
uh his act was not small if you think, well,
sure he did this at some county fairs and sideshows
uh and then his wife made him stop. Yeah, not
true at all. He actually got really famous for this.
I don't know. I mean they likened him to Elvis Presley.
I don't know if he was that big. I think
the point the authors making is like that this guy
(11:16):
wasn't some some like, he wasn't Internet famous, he was
like famous famous, Like he traveled the world doing this.
It's good for him, right, Yeah, And he didn't. As
he traveled the world, people were like, I can do
that too. Tired of working, I want to do this.
But it turns out that from what I can tell,
(11:36):
as far as showbiz goes, running your own flee circus
has got to be one of the more demanding side
shows there there are. Well sure, I mean part of
the problem is your performers. Well, first of all, it
says in here and this is like again with this research,
you just sort of have to take some of these
people at their word. But they say that about one
(11:57):
in tin fleas can even make the cut, right. Uh.
Once you find your your champion team of they're they're
gonna die and there need to be cared for and
traveling all over the world with your prized fleas is precarious. Well, yeah.
Especially um, if you're traveling to do shows and colder
(12:19):
climbs there aren't fleas, and fleas don't do very well there.
Your whole troop may die the night before a show.
Can you imagine? But apparently it happened a lot. There
was a guy I read and I'm not quite sure
who it was, but they he had a a standing
gig in I think Switzerland maybe or somewhere somewhat northern Europe,
(12:41):
and he had to send down No she I'm sorry,
she had to send down to Majorca to get um
fresh shipments of fleas like every two weeks because hers
just kept She couldn't keep them alive any longer than Yes,
I have offers from all over the world to take
my show, but you're afraid of one thing when you
get out of the country, can you at fleas? I
went to Sweden and I had to send to ma
(13:02):
Yorka in Spain to get fleas fortnite every fortnight. Who
was that? It was a woman a sword swallower right? Uh?
Was that Professor Tomlin? No, I can't remember her name,
but she's like a legendary sword swallower. Um professor tests No,
Professor Chester. No, none of the professors, And that was
another thing I noticed from this too, but I couldn't
(13:24):
really find the origin. Apparently, if you had a flee
circuses from from like the nineteenth century to the early
twentieth century, you the flea master, build yourself as professor
or whatever. So there's just all these really weird trends.
But the in the history of flee circuses, it was
like one person would come up with an idea and
then they go and show it and for some reason
(13:46):
it would attract a bunch of other imitators, and that's
that's basically the history of it. I would have built
myself as account oh man, you know, that would have
broken new ground. But they would have to pay money.
And this says in the nineteen fifties professors still said
we pay six shillings a dozen, although there have been
times of shortage when a single flea has cost as
much as two shillings. Well, you know, also, if you
(14:08):
look around today, at which I did, I couldn't find
anywhere to buy fleas. You have to send off for
um overseas um. But I've thought, surely there's some weirdo
somewhere who's selling fleas to flee circuses and there are none,
none whatsoever. Well, there is a flee circus in Germany. Still, yeah,
(14:30):
at the Munich October Fest. Where else would you have one?
Oh it's Mimi Gono, that was her name, the flee circus,
uh woman? Okay, yeah, alright, so you wanna take a
little break here, Yeah, all right, well let's break. Let's
go pick the fleas from our own bodies. I know,
I'm I'm itching or scratching. Then maybe we can train
(14:51):
them to finish this episode for us. So, Chuck, we
(15:19):
we kind of made it as far as Bertie Lotto,
and there's actually a lot of mystery surrounding that guy.
Here's the weird thing. Okay, I'm going to confess something
to you. When I first read this article, I was like, well,
here's a stinker. Then I dug in a little further
and I was like, oh, I'm being tortured with research
to do a stinker. And then the more I did,
the more I did, the more I dug in, I'd
(15:41):
find these weird little things that kept popping up that
combined create the the the history or the culture of
flea circuses. And and the more I came upon these
little things and putting them together more the more. I
was just totally delighted. But then I think, like you
when I when I finally hit YouTube and it was like, okay,
I need to see some of these. Then I was like,
(16:02):
I love flee circuses. I could sit here and talk
about him all day. Well, we'll try and keep this
all day. So I just realized I didn't finish my thought.
The um the weird little thing that I found out
about Professor bar Lolo, thanks man Um, he just vanished,
(16:24):
he disappeared. He was like as famous as as an astronaut,
and then all of a sudden he's gone. And there's
a guy um who is uh. I think his name
is Andy Rich. He's like basically the foremost Flee circus
researcher working today. And he found Professor Berto Lotto. Apparently
(16:44):
he moved to Canada and lived out the rest of
his life and anonymity. Wow, yeah, I have a question.
Why do you always use asked not as a fame indicator,
it's uh, it's as Simpsons reference. It's Homer was saying,
somebody who's richer than an astronat. I was gonna challenge
you and say, name an astronaut. Oh, dude, Jim Lovell No, no, no,
(17:08):
name a current astronaut. Oh current astronat We got Mark
Kelly and Scott Kelly. Okay, alright, t get back off.
Then her their parents called them Project Jim and I,
oh that's cute. But they think they not just made
that up? Oh really? Yeah? Oh man, that would have
been surely someone as I thought of that. If not,
(17:30):
I'm gonna trade market. Uh yeah, and then you could
blackmail them. I feel like you want this nickname. I
know you're richer than an astro. Alright, So early nineteen hundreds,
if you're talking imitators over here in the United States,
we had a man named William Heckler, and he was
one of the first dudes over here to be a
(17:50):
successful fleamaster. And uh he did the usual things, made
them box and race and juggle. And we're gonna tell
you some of these secret it's by the way. If
you're wondering how these things are accomplished, just hang in there. Uh.
And he said at one point he was bringing in
two hundred and fifty dollars uh day or performance in
(18:12):
a in a day of performances, a day. Yeah, so
many many performances. And here's the thing if lee I
kind of wondered I was, because I didn't find it
until later in the research, like, well, how do you
see this stuff? But you wouldn't have very many people
in there. You'd have like ten or fifteen people crowded
around a little table for six to ten minutes. You
(18:33):
would shuffle them out and bring in the next group. Yes,
I saw somewhere that if you were really dedicated to it.
I think Cecil Adams wrote it on the on the
Street dope that if you were like a really dedicated performer,
you could conceivably do fifty ten minute performances a day.
So that's basically like ten hours with a ten minute
(18:53):
break every hour. And if you're not a really dedicated
flea master, then just get out of my face. What
do you even bother? Seriously, though, I mean is when
we talk about how to do this, it will become
clear just how much work this must be. Yeah, alright,
well let's talk a little bit about that. Um, every
flee is different. And like I said, uh, if you
believe the research, about ten percent of the fleezer fit
(19:16):
for the job, and it's like we mentioned, you don't
really train them. What you do is back in the day,
you would take either some silken thread or some really
thin gold wire, like hopefully you can't even see it,
that's sort of the idea, and you tie a little
tiny noose of sorts around this fleezer neck. And apparently
(19:41):
that was really hard to do because when a fleet
eats the blood of their master, which is true, we'll
get to that again later, but their next well, so
you can't tie it too tight or else they're gonna
die and your prize flee could die. Or if it's
too loose, then the flea goes away and the chariot
(20:03):
stays behind, and that's no good. And you just hear
a tiny bionic man sounds right, So um, that's very hard.
Number one. Number two the idea that you have to
do that with new fleas every I would guess probably
every few weeks if you're on average, because fleas, I
(20:25):
mean they live maybe a year. Most fleas live about
three or four months. So you've got like a some
star performers and they're just they're performing, you know, for
a few months or whatever. So you're having to basically
constantly harness fleas all the time, and and again before
you even harness them, you have to sort them. So
(20:46):
you have to study and observe the adult fleas see
which one's like to jump. Um. There's an old legend,
uh that apparently came from Professor Heckler's son, if not
Professor Heckler himself, who said, um, you you put a
lid over a jar, and you can train them not
to jump too high because they'll hit their head on
(21:07):
the jar and they don't like to do that. So
they learned not to jump. Then they've passed their first test.
It's not clear whether that's actually hocum or not, but um,
that's for for a very long time, that's been part
of the lower of training fleets. The problem is, I
think you said it, please can't actually learn anything. They're
(21:27):
not really being trained. They're actually being physically restrained in
lots of ways, including that harness and starting with the harness. Well,
I don't know, though, Heckler. Professor Heckler that is also said,
and this was fascinating to me as far as whether
or not these fleas can learn anything. He said that
he would to get the best fleas, put them in
a glass jar. Uh, that's too tall for them to
(21:50):
jump out. And he said that he would notice the
really good fleas would jump up on the side, fart
out a little bit of sticky stuff, whatever that is,
and then spend the rest of the time trying and
trying to hit that identical spot again to grab hold
of the sticky stuff basically a foothold to be close
(22:11):
enough to the top to leap out. Amazing. I don't know,
hope I believe it. He well, yeah, I mean he
was a showman, consummist, showman, Like he didn't just basically
point and be like, look at the fleas, came your money,
please leave now, Like you were like carrying the show on, right,
you had to tell this this this, You had to
help the performance along, your professor, for god's sake, right,
(22:34):
when this guy is being interviewed over the years, I
can't imagine he didn't like ham it up in the interviews.
So I don't know, like a lot of it's lost
too to time, what was true and what wasn't as
far as these these old guys go. Yeah, but he uh,
Professor Heckler also said when he was picking them out,
and he said, stodgy wins are broken to the merry
(22:56):
go round harness flight he fleas make good dancers. Those
with especially strong legs will become kickers, jugglers and chariot racers. Yes,
so you've got you've got fleas harness. That's like the
first initial thing, but there's other things you need to
do to them. To write. You can take that harness,
and the most basic thing you could do is take
(23:17):
that harness and actually hook it up to, like you said,
a chariot or or or a merry go round or
something like that. And yeah, people will be like, that's
pretty neat, that's cool. But before I could do that,
you know, but you could do other stuff too, and
a lot of it involves glue unfortunately. So say like
you take a tiny piece of um of wood or
(23:40):
a tiny piece of metal and you glue it to
the flea's arms, right, Yes, and we should say once
that happens, that's it. That's never that's never coming off
for the rest of the fleas life. Yeah. I mean,
do you think they even survived that day? I think so. Yeah.
(24:01):
I think that they typically survive a few weeks of performing. Okay,
so even if they had a little sword glued to
their body. Yeah, I think they live horrible lives. I
mean basically, we as a species should know more about
this because if the fleas have a rise up and
become intelligent, like our backs are against the wall for
what the flee circus flea masters have done to them
(24:22):
glued to the wall, they'll be like, oh, guess whose
turn it is? Alright, so go ahead, Oh so you
you um, you glue a piece of stick or something
to their arms, and remember already they're harnessed. And then
you do the same thing to another flee and then
you tie their harnesses down and you just kind of
tickle them or do something to stimulate them, and they
(24:43):
start waving their arms and it looks like the sword fighting.
So that's a really good example of a flee circus.
Like you're you're having them do things, and then the
flea masters like, well, look at this, this is a
sword fight, everybody see they're doing or fencing or something
like that, right, and train them to do so exactly exactly.
So there's there's these things were Really it's the interaction
(25:06):
between a restrained flee, usually with the prop glued to it,
defending itself or responding to some sort of noxious or
threatening stimuli and then the flea master coming in and saying, oh,
they're they're fencing, or they're walking the high wire something
or there. This is Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo. Yeah,
(25:28):
they would play soccer. Like I said, So, what they
would do there is they would get a little piece
of cotton wool. Uh, they would soak it in something
that the fleet doesn't like, some odorous, malodorous thing. Yeah,
I looked that up. Like lavender works really well, citranilla,
cedar oil, those are all lovely. That's the shame. But
come to think of it, when you see natural flee sprays,
(25:48):
that's what's in natural flee spray exactly. So they would
soak it in that stuff and then uh, just the
flee would literally just kick at it to get it
away like a little soccer ball. Right, they're either kicking
at it to get it away or because they were
restrained and when they kick, instead of it propelling the
flea away, it's repelling the ball away from them. So
(26:09):
if you have them this kind of do that back
and forth, then yeah, they're playing soccer. What about juggling, Josh,
love it what you do there is he would glue
a flee to its on its back basically and then
put another little tiny piece of cotton and their legs
and they would kick at it trying to get it off,
(26:29):
and it apparently would just kind of go up and
down and spin around like it was juggling. Amazing. Yeah,
and like this is this is uh thanks to Heckler
in particular in the United States. Um, he really started
hitting the county fairs and um, the the the carnivals,
so it became basically part and parcel with the with
(26:52):
sideshows the circus. Like basically, anytime you went to a
decent carnival, there's a flea circus there. Yeah. And I
get the feeling that these professors would try and they
would try and innovate, They would try and come up
with new tricks and new things that would delight people,
because you want to keep people coming back, you know, right,
So that's where you come up with things like the
(27:13):
the hype Howire act and the flea walls when it
would appear as if a fleet orchestra was playing and
fleas were dancing. Yeah, because there's there's other things that
fleas respond to. Two besides um citronella. They respond very
well the heat. They can sense heat very well, and
if it gets too hot, they want to get out
of there. So if you apply heat from beneath on
(27:36):
say like uh just um, I don't know, a drumhead
or something like that, they'll all start hopping around. But
if they if they can't get away, if they're harnessed in,
then it looks like they're dancing. If you put a
little flea orchestra to the side with instruments glued to
their their arms at a nice backbeat exactly, then you
have fleas playing music and fleas dancing to it. A
(27:57):
fleet ball. Uh. So this all is delightful and well
and good. Um, but what fun is a naked little
flee doing these things? If you could have a flee
dressed up as Napoleon, right, And that's what they did.
They apparently historical figures were lampooned. Uh. They would supposedly
(28:19):
get Mexican nuns who had quote nimble fingers tired and
eyes deteriorated. I don't see how that makes any sense.
So they're these they they're nimble fingers grew tired in
their eyes deteriorated as we're making these things. Okay, I
thought that was that was a good quality they look
for in a Mexican nun. Seems stress. How are your
(28:43):
nimble fingers feeling? That's kind of tired. They're tired. That's sad.
Actually then, so they would get apparently these Mexican nuns
to make these tiny little costumes, and um, they're still
on display today if you go to uh, how do
you pronounce that name? England? Mispronounced everything in England. It's
spelled Hertfordshire show Cambridge, all right, Cambridge, England. I think
(29:08):
it's where at the Rothschild Zoological Museum there are two
fleas dressed as Mexican fleas on display, and right in
our lovely Edinburgh, Scotland that we adored so much. Had
I sped at home, had I known that there was
a museum of childhood there with a flea wedding party
dressed up on display, I would have gone in a second.
(29:32):
But yeah, it was a thing. I think it was
already a thing in Mexico, and the flea circus masters
said hey, I need to get some of those, so chuck,
if you have a bunch of fleas and they're making
you money. You want to keep them alive, right, how
would you do that? Well, as we all know, fleas
(29:53):
or parasitic blood suckers. Uh. And so they would just
go down to the blog bank and get a bag
of blood right right, and let the fleece swim around
in it. Yeah, and they loved it. Know what they
would do is and this is like, it gives me
chills thinking about it. They would roll up their sleeves
and stick their arm down there and let the fleas
feed on their bodies. Yeah, a couple of times a day.
(30:16):
But apparently apparently though it was part of every single
show that you would end the show with. And now,
since these fleet performers have done so great, I shall
let them least on my blood, and the crowd would
be like you gross? That makes sense. Yeah, it was
part of stage pattern, but apparently at least Heckler, but
I'm sure others actually did let the fleece feed on them. Uh. Yeah.
(30:41):
I mean, what's a good flea master to do? Well,
feed your fleas blood Either that or have like again,
a chimney sweep that you bought from a chimney sweeper
to let the Fleece feed on. I hope that the
episode has come out, but it's going to be really confused. Yeah,
or it'll be really delightful when it does come out
and they'll be like, oh that makes sense now. Hey,
(31:05):
one more thing about Heckler. So there was a Heckler Sr.
And Junior, and apparently Junior kept it going in Times
Square until like the late fifties had a flee circus going,
and Heckler's flee Circus shows up in a scene an
Easy Rider. No way. Yeah, I couldn't figure out what's scene.
I didn't have time to go check, but there's a
(31:28):
scene an Easy Rider where in the background there's Heckler's
flee Circus. And then they were pushed out of Times
Square by peep shows, and then the peep shows were
pushed out by Walt Disney and Giuliani. Yeah, Heckler tried
at first to do pants less flee circus, but it
didn't work very well. Yeah, no one wants and finally
(31:50):
just packed it up. All right, Well, let's take one
final break here and we will talk about another kind
of flee circus right after this. So check one thing
(32:22):
that I found. I'm pretty sure you found it too,
was that when you start looking into flee circuses, some
people think that there is never such a thing as
flee circuses that used real fleas. Yeah, I thought you
were going to say, when you start looking into flee circuses,
there's no going back, you'll never be the same again.
That's definitely your like, unchanged forever. Yeah. I always thought
(32:45):
that flee circuses were a complete ruse and that there
were never any real fleas performing, right, Apparently, No, that's
not the case. There have been, and indeed, ours recently
as the nineties, there have been flee circuses that you
real fleas following these traditions that we just mentioned. But
(33:05):
if you believe that there are plenty of flee circuses
out there that don't use any fleas whatsoever, you're right too,
because there's both. Yes, there's the type of flee circus
that doesn't use fleas is called a humbug flee circus.
It's all it's all stage magic, it's all illusion, and
it's pretty pretty awesome. Actually. Yeah. There was a man,
(33:29):
a magician named George Tollerton in the nineteen thirties, and
he wrote a booklet actually um outlining fake flee circuses
and skits that you can do wherein you're sort of
the I mean, while the carnival barking was going on
in the real flee circuses. Um, you you really want
(33:49):
to take center stage if you have a fake flee
circus as then not only introducing the death defying feats,
but then you are are following these fleas, jumping around
on with mimicking it with your eyes and following it around,
you know, by moving your head around as if the
audience is looking at some invisible thing, which they are, right, right,
(34:12):
they are, and you're basically just using your powers of
suggestion to get them to think they're seeing what you're saying. Right, Yeah,
that's the most like basic humbug flee circus there are, right,
But there's one in that that started like that. I
guess the genuine stagecraft stage magic um humbug flee circus
(34:36):
came about from Michael Benteen, who was a goon actually, right,
remember that explain that the goons showed up in the
Monty Python episode. They were the direct predecessor of Monty Python,
Spike Milligan and his goons. Yes, he wasn't a hockey
playing goon. That's a different thing. Or a goon on
(34:58):
Scooby Doo or a goony, right, just a regular old goon. Yeah,
Michael Benty and he was a British performer and entertainer
and he uh in nineteen fifty performed that the UH
called the Royal Variety Show. I guess I think so.
And it was a little, you know, fake flee circus
(35:19):
apparently pretty elaborate one, yeah, because rather than just using
like his um power of suggestion, he was using things
like magnets and remote control pumps and mechanical devices to
really kind of do this exaggerated simulation of a flee
doing stuff going through the circuit of his flee circus. Right.
(35:42):
So he would say, have a magnet or a piece
of string of something or something pushing a ball or
rather pulling a ball up a hill an incline, and
he would say that this is the uh, the flee
sysiphus and he's pushing this ball up a hill, right
or um, this is this is my favorite. This gets
me every time a flee going up on the high
dive board and then so as he's going up there,
(36:05):
the wrongs of the ladder, each one gets depressed right,
so you can see the fleece progress up. The ladder
gets up to the end of the board, jumps a
couple of times, so the springboard goes up and down,
and then it makes a springing sound as he jumps
off right exactly dives into the water, and there's like
this huge splash, which a fleet could never make a
(36:25):
splash to begin with, but a huge one. It's just hilarious.
Or I like the one the sand table. They would
have a little sandbox in the fleet with the fake
fleet would invisibly jump around, but it would create a
little splash of sand everywhere. He dropped all over the
place and again, all with magnets, all fake ery. Yeah,
(36:45):
but really really clever. I get the impression. He was
not um, not terribly old at the time when he
first debuted on tv UM, And in the grand tradition
of flee circuses, some other people saw it and said,
I want to do it too, So the Humbug flee
circus took off and became pretty popular, and like the
(37:06):
second half of the twentieth century, I should say popular
as far as flee circuses go, which is to say,
not very popular, right, popular among weirdos. Yeah, I'm really
kind of wondering about this burta Lotto and his fame,
like he might not have been I don't know. I
mean just because you travel the world. I mean, he
(37:26):
could have been traveling the world performing in front of
you know, sixty people a day. That's not exactly Elvis.
It's true. This whole thing is under a cloud of suspicion,
is yeah. Man, it's really tough to figure out the
what's from the who's, and the winds and the why
and the fleas from the magnets. Yeah. Yeah, because once
(37:48):
you introduced that humbug ury into it, everything comes into question.
There was, actually, though, there was a book that I
want to get. It's a it's a pamphlet basically turned
into a book from that a guy named Tom Palmer wrote.
It's called the Famous Flee Act, and it teaches you
everything you need to know to do a humbug flee circus.
(38:12):
I just want to read it just for funzies. You know,
Christmas is coming up. I bet you someone out there
I'll send that to you. I was talking to you.
That's just someone else out there. Well okay, uh my
call to you. The public listening stuff you should know
public is Ano. They're doing this in October Fest. But
(38:34):
somebody needs to bring this back in a big way. Well,
a woman did in the nineties, but it didn't take
for very long. But I mean it was pretty big
in the nineties. Um. Her name was h what is it, Chuck,
Maria Fernanda Cardoso. Okay, did you read about her? No,
you should check out her act. You didn't see the
(38:55):
video of it. No, there's like a seven eight minute
vimeo of her and apparently it's just the highlights, So
I guess their act was longer, and she's a performance artist,
so um it was. She did it at like different places,
like she did at the New Museum in New York
and um, San Francisco and just kind of some some
(39:16):
pretty neat places places you wouldn't expect to see a
flee circus, is what I'm saying. I guess. But she
used live fleece in the grand tradition of flee circuses
and uh made a very beautiful, neat almost circutus, so
laish flee circus in the nineties. Yeah, but there's a
video of it, or there's plenty of videos. I'm sure
(39:38):
of it out there. Um, just flick her up and
look for the flee circus video with with our thumbs
up on it. Yeah, and you know, we kind of
joked about this being cruel it. Um, it's easy to
say this is a fleece and who cares. But I'm
sure there are people that get up in arms about
using any sort of you know, mistreating and animal for
(40:00):
any kind of or insects, animals. Let's just say for
this argument, for sure, for the entertainment of humans. You know,
there's probably at least one person out there that thinks
this is a very cruel thing to do. Know, there's uh,
there's apparently um societies that are dedicated to preventing cruelty
to insects in particular, and they have called specifically for
(40:24):
flea circuses to be banned outright. And they make a
pretty convincing case, especially if you don't allow yourself to
stop and remind yourself that these are fleas we're talking about.
But they you know, they're held in captivity their whole lives.
They're held um, they're connected by a harness that keeps
them held down their entire lives. The tricks that they're
(40:47):
performing are actually like stress behaviors. Um, and uh, they
die probably prematurely. Yeah, well as what went off on
fleas in the fleet episode, So I can't really say
anything about that. Sure, I've had bad infestations and I've
had no problem grabbing them between my hands and holding
(41:09):
them underwater until they slowly drowned. Right, They're like, please
just crush me, and you say, never drown. You can't
crush them. You can crush a flee if you get
it's hardy fingernails, that's your problem. You butt your fingernails
too much. Yeah, but you try to smash a flee
and he just goes dying. Do do do do? Yeah?
(41:30):
Anything else? Um, you can buy flee circuses, ready made
flea circuses if you want. Well that's fun. Yeah, um,
like an ant form. Good luck finding fleas is the thing, right,
and I think that's it. Man, that's a flea circuses.
Just go watch some flee circus videos on TV or
(41:51):
on the computer TV. You're gonna love it. Yeah, it's
a good way to just dumb it down and check out. Yeah,
it's delightful though too. Uh, since I said it's delightful
if you want to know, that's right, I got all order.
I was thinking about Flee circuses. Yeah, if you want
to know more about Flee Circus, it's do what I
just said, and you can also type those words in
the search part. How stuff works. And since I said
(42:13):
it's delightful, before it's time for a listener mail, I'm
gonna call this what the writer called it, which is
pick me for listener mail. Thanks from a teacher. Okay,
it's hard to resist. Josh, Chuck and Jerry, and finally
writing do you all. I've been listening stuff you should
know for years. I think I've listened to nearly every episode,
(42:34):
even the ones from the Dark Days when the discussion
lasted fewer than ten minutes and Josh was still looking
for his perfect podcasting partner. My sister introduced me to you.
So if you pick this for listener mail, please do
be extremely cool. If you give my sister Laura a
shout wow, that is really nice. If you, Chuck, is
you're feeling very generous regardless, I've been meaning to email
(42:55):
my thanks and praise for your work. I was at
high school english teacher in Illinois, but reesely relocated Chattanooga, Tennessee,
where I've been moved on where I've moved on to
become a community college professor. Uh. A professor. Maybe she
could train police. Uh. Your podcast has been a great
supplemental teaching tool, not to mention, a guaranteed way to
keep my mind occupied during long road trips to and
(43:16):
from undergraduate and graduate school or while running with my dog.
Us the episode on book banning several times while teaching
to Kill a Mockingbird or informing students about Banned book Week.
I've also used the episode about police interrogation during a
unit featuring Walter dean Myer's novel Monster, about a boy
who was on trial for a crime he may not
have committed. That sounds good, it does, uh. And more recently,
(43:39):
I use a listener mail about the benefits of hunting
as an example of how to structure an argument. Let's
hear that. I want to hear that argument. We'll schefs
are right back in. Uh. The students got a laugh
out of Josh's comments about waiting for the deer to
fall over and collecting the dead bodies instead of actually
killing the animal. Anyway. Really enjoyed the show. Look forward
(44:01):
to new episodes every week. If teaching doesn't work out
for some reason, I think podcasting would be a pretty
great career. Uh. And that is from Sarah Amato, Professor Amato,
and uh shout out to Laura yep, her sister, Laura
Amato or whatever her name is. Shout out not presuming
they have the same last name. My modern guy you
(44:25):
are anyway, you have a beard. Thanks for teaching and
uh doing what you do, Professor. Yeah, and thanks for
writing in Smart Thinking with the subject line. If you
want to get in touch with us, you can tweet
to us. I'm at josh um Clark at Twitter, and
you can also follow the official s Y s K
(44:45):
podcast on Twitter, Getting Out with Chuck at Charles W.
Chuck Bryant on Facebook or Facebook dot com slash Stuff
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(45:08):
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Anna Sale explores the big questions and hard choices that are often left out of polite conversation.
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If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.